On living light, providing genuine value and being constructively free

The Book

A digital nomad is a new breed of digital workers. They don’t have a fixed office, most of the time they travel around the world and their favorite place of work is usually a coffee shop.

They code, they write, they interact. They’re creating and maintaining a personal brand on their specific niche of expertise.

But, most of all, being a digital nomad is a new lifestyle, one that can free you from the corporate slavery. If only you’d be willing to pay the price, that is.

About The Author

As Seen On:

Dragos Roua is a serial online entrepreneur, an ultra-runner and author of 9 books (some of them translated in other languages).

After making his first successful exit, he started to experiment with a new way of living, by traveling, trying new business models and maintaining a constant presence on his blog, at DragosRoua.com.

For 4 straight years, he’s been working as a digital nomad in various countries and trying different approaches. This book is a chronicle of these adventures.

Foreword

I’ve been living like a digital nomad for almost 4 years now. Meaning I don’t have an office anymore, I work in coffee shops, using a laptop, a smartphone and, every once in a while, a tablet.

It wasn’t always like this, you know. Before that, I had an online publishing company, with employees, forecasts, offices and business cards. The whole package. So, what happened?

Well, the story goes back in 2008. That’s when I sold my online publishing company and decided to make a major change in my lifestyle. Little I knew at that time about the size and depth of the change I was going to experience.

The selling contract had a non-compete clause. For 2 years in a row I wasn’t allowed to do business on the same niches I did with my company, in a number of countries in Europe, where the buyer of my business had operations. New Zealand wasn’t on this list.

So, for the next 2 years I set up a wonderful plan: to create an online brand using a blog and move to New Zealand with my family. I had a family at that time. But, as John Lennon would say: “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.”. My relationship with my ex-wife ended. Don’t get me wrong, all things in this world are bound to end at some point. Some will end sooner than we’re expecting them to, that’s all.

So, the personal part of the plan went bonkers. On the business level, though, things were going finel. In the next years my blog, at DragosRoua.com grew up pretty well. It reached a decent audience of 100.000 unique visitors by month. I started to create an ecosystem of products around it. Ebooks, iPhone apps, online courses.

Some of them even starting to sell. And some of them started to sell pretty well. In 2009 and 2010 I traveled around the world. I spent a few weeks or months in countries like New Zealand, Japan, Thailand, United States and many more in Europe.

It was a decompression. There was too much steam accumulated as a busy entrepreneur, who forgot that life is made to be lived, not to be transformed in money at every corner. And, sometimes around 2009 I started to detach from the traditional way of doing business. I started to work more and more in coffee shops. I changed my social circles. I made friends on 10-15 countries. Digital friends, in the beginning, but almost all of them became real friends, with real life interactions.

And, around the end of 2009 I realized that my new lifestyle is what I now call being a digital nomad.

This book is a small recap of my last 4 years.

It’s not a manual, because being a digital nomad is not a formal occupation. It’s more of a state of mind than a lifestyle that can be taught and learned.

Testimonials

Alexandru Kelerman

I am a big fan of delivering value to your clients first, and then ask for money. That’s pretty much what Dragos does in this book. As a coffee addict, I also work a lot in coffee shops and I found many useful tricks in this book.

Raluca Popescu

As a digital nomad myself I found a lot of insights in this book. As an early adopter of the Open Connect community, I can only testify that the chapter about that is spot on.

Mike Donovan – Amazon.com Review

First of all, I really like Dragos Roua’s posts at his website. He’s an extremely intelligent guy with excellent writing skills. However, His definition of “living off the grid,” is not the standard definition. […] Even though it’s not the accepted definition, it was fascinating and I learned some interesting things. I obviously have an early Kindle version of the book and had to get past lots of grammar and spelling errors, but the content was fairly new to me and pretty interesting.